In the prior art it is usual to use a maintenance system for several hundred up to two thousand functional entities to control the status of the different functional entities, to provide reports about the function and other kinds of statuses including error messages, number of prints messages, accountable message and the like.
In office systems, a plurality of office machines can be spread in a building or can also be spread all over a whole country and it is usually a problem to provide the maintenance and the supplies for a big number of office machines, like printers, multifunction printers, copiers and the like.
The present disclosure is particularly directed to the maintenance of office machines or function units including a printer. The functional unit can be accessed by the maintenance system regularly or the functional unit can access to the maintenance system in case of a malfunction or another error.
The company or a customer which uses several hundreds or thousands of office machines wishes to know about the function of each of the different office machines, whether an office machine has a malfunction, whether an office machine needs supplies for the further function, for instance toner or ink or paper or the like. In such a case the different office machines are communicating with the system and the maintenance system can regularly request the different office machines to transmit their current status to the system or in case of a malfunction, the particular office machine can send a request to the system or the server of the system to initiate a communication to report the current status including the information about the error which occurred in the particular office machine.
It is particularly time consuming and processing time consuming to communicate with a big number of office machines and to manage the data achieved through the communication.
In the prior art it is usual to receive the data from the different office machines without checking whether the data is relevant or not. The data is written in a database and the data is then transmitted to the maintenance provider who processes the data for statistical purposes, maintenance purposes and accounting purposes.
However, most of the data will be repeated since not only malfunction status data or run out data are stored and transmitted, but also data concerning proper functions and proper conditions are transmitted, stored, and will have to be processed to find out the relevant data. The very big amount of data to be exchanged and transmitted in this connection limits the capacity of such systems to about two thousand office machines, like printers or multifunctional printers, including copiers, facsimile devices and the like.
To be able to communicate with more than two thousand office machines would need several servers and their inter-server communication generates another problem. The management of the server operation would slow down system and in case more and more servers would be necessary to operate a more complicated system of a big number of office machines for instance about 15000 office machines, the processor operation time and the capacity of the processors would again be the bottleneck for the whole system since the processors would have always to import and export the data to be processed, which in existing maintenance systems needs a lot of time also because the data have to be imported from the database which needs a lot of time.
Corresponding problems could occur on other technical fields. For instance, it could be that a mobile phone network provider wishes to provide additional maintenance features. In case the accumulator of a mobile phone undergoes a certain power level, this kind of functional entity could communicate corresponding information to the maintenance system for statistical purposes, alert signal purposes or the like.
The same can be interesting on the future field of electronic households, cars with a self-diagnosis of fault communication system, were malfunctions or shortage conditions, for instance a motor or gear oil shortage condition in a motor vehicle can occur, or on other fields, were corresponding functional entities may have to be provided with services like maintenance services, alert signal services, spare part order services, account services and the like.